As a serving policeman, there are several things I am not allowed to talk about.

There are plenty of operational secrets we cannot discuss, but I’m not referring to those. I’m talking about the taboo subjects. The ‘detection’ rate for rape is one of these.

It’s very frustrating to sit and listen to pundits talking about the low number of rape convictions in Court, when as police officers we all know what lies behind these poor numbers.

For example, I couldn’t possibly tell you that out of every ten rapes which are reported in Ruraltown, at least eight turn out to be nonsense. To be fair, eight out of ten of everything reported at Ruraltown police station is nonsense, why should rape be any different?

I couldn’t tell you that of the remaining two, an existing alcohol-fuelled chaotic drug-based relationship is a factor in at least one of these, and ‘consent’ is probably present in the other to some degree. In my whole service I can only recall three stranger rapes and a half a dozen where consent was withdrawn at the time and he carried on. But I can’t tell you that.

I can’t tell you that most of the adult rapes reported in Ruraltown represent either the latest in a series of allegations designed to score points against an ‘ex, lies designed to fend off an angry parent when a curfew has been missed or a defence mechanism when a jilted ‘partner’ discovers an infidelity.

A rape once reported, even if withdrawn later, is in the system and a failure to bring someone to justice, even if it never happened, shows up in the ‘detection’ rate. The ‘detection rate’ is low because the number of rapes which actually happen is low. I couldn’t possibly say that though...

The facts about rape seen from the street are this: most genuine rapes are against children under 13 years old and are within the family or family circle. Genuine adult rape is rare and nearly always charged to Court; what a jury do next is for them, but it usually comes down to ‘consent’ issues, and being as they were not in the bedroom at the time, and we are not simply proving intercourse because that is already admitted by the defendant, it’s not really within our gift to prove or disprove consent. Consent can amount to one word, said in a half whisper six months before in a darkened room where no one else was present.

But we can’t possibly say any of this. We will simply accept that it’s all our fault and promise to do better in the future.

I don't know. The one thing I'll say is that from purely anecdotal evidence, the chats a young man has with young women, is that an awful lot of girls seem to have had some kind of assault in their early teenage years - from the groper on the bus who you dread to see getting on board (and of course you've not told your parents although it's happened several times) to the one-off stranger exposing himself as you take a short-cut though the churchyard. There are definitely some bad people out there.

Meanwhile, back in lovely Croydon - into what category would the inspector put this alleged attack :

A teenager was chased down a residential street after being raped by her new “boyfriend” and his flatmate, a court heard. Cousins Corrie Pinney, 35, of Yardbridge Close, Belmont, and Jermaine Kraftner, 27, from Poole, Dorset, also invited Desmond Enwright, their uncle and father respectively, into the room to join in the attack, Croydon Crown Court heard on Monday... the group stayed up drinking, smoking cannabis and listening to music before Mr Kraftner said: “You don’t know what you’ve signed yourself up for.”

Charming. I keep hearing that most sexual assaults take place within the family, not with the participation of a family.

Mr Pinney and Mr Kraftner deny charges of rape, sexual assault, false imprisonment and ABH against two victims in separate attacks. They have admitted charges of ABH relating to a second alleged rape, which Cassie Webb, 20, from Croydon, denies aiding and abetting. She also denies false imprisonment during the attack in 2010.

The mother and daughter were visiting Taryn’s boyfriend Jason Stevens, who had lost his 17-year-old sister in a car accident in August, when the trio spotted Georgia Marney walking down Cudham Drive. She had been banned from the road pending her upcoming court case for causing death by dangerous driving.

As Mrs Price was driving towards Marney she shouted at her out of the window of her car. She told the court: “I said ‘What the hell are you doing here, you are not supposed to be here. I did call her a murderer, which I should not have done. She was shouting rubbish at us, f-ing and blinding.” Marney walked towards the car, punching the window three times to make it shatter. Her daughter Taryn jumped out of the car to protect Mrs Price, whom she feared Marney was going to punch, and began grappling with her in the street. She also admitted calling the teenager a murderer as they fought and pulled each other’s hair, before Mrs Price stood on Marney’s hair so her daughter could escape.

As Taryn Price got up to collect her phone from the middle of the road, Marney kicked her mother in the face, breaking her glasses and leaving a cut above her eyebrow which required hospital treatment.

Croydon, I was last there in the 1960's when I worked for Nestles ( then pronounced Nestles not as now Nestlay). It struck me, as a Liverpudlian as being a quiet suburban commuter town. They must have put something in the water to make it a vibrant and diverse community.